Trump election win could fuel US private prison boom

• Private prison companies bet big on Trump
• Biden slowed, but did not stop, federal use
• Trump’s ‘mass deportations’ likely boon for private jails

RICHMOND, Virginia/LOS ANGELES – Forget polling or prediction markets – if you want to take the political temperature of the United States ahead of the presidential election, look at the stock prices of the country’s biggest private prison conglomerates, said Bianca Tylek.

Tylek, executive director of the non-profit group Worth Rises, was on vacation when President Barack Obama issued an executive order aimed at phasing out the federal government’s use of privately run prisons in 2016.

Among those hardest hit were GEO Group and CoreCivic, two of the top private prison companies in the United States.

“I remember that because I was getting so many text messages abroad saying have you seen the news today? Look at GEO’s and CoreCivic’s stock price … and they had tanked,” she recalled.

“Then, in (November 2016) when Trump was elected, the private prison stocks were actually the biggest single day gainers after Trump’s election,” she said.

Such companies are putting “all their money, right now, into the bet that Trump gets elected,” she said.

Shares in GEO Group rose by some 24%, and CoreCivic by 15%, in the last month.

GEO Group was an early major financial backer of both former President Donald Trump’s campaign and another pro-Trump outside political group, according to the legal watchdog group Citizens for Ethics and Responsibility in Washington (CREW). 

Perhaps more than any other single issue, Trump is running on a campaign of mass deportation of undocumented immigrants, a policy that would require a vast expansion of privately run prisons and immigration detention centres across the country.

The consequences would be profound for the more than 11 million people who could end up ensnared in the scheme.

“If you’re rounding up millions of people, you’re going to need somewhere to put them, at least before you deport them,” said Robert Maguire of CREW. “That could see a rise in the use of private prisons.”

‘Haven’t really been boxed out’

GEO Group’s political action committee moved early this year to donate a maximum $5,000 to the Trump campaign, in addition to a $500,000 donation from a GEO subsidiary to a pro-Trump group, according to an analysis from CREW’s Maguire and Lauren White.

The company also not only donated to his 2017 inauguration, but moved its annual corporate event to one of his properties, White said.

“They have not only been fuelling Trump’s political aspirations, but they have been putting money directly in Trump’s pocket by using his businesses in a pretty conspicuous way,” he said.

“One of the ways it’s sort of obvious to see why they would do this is the way you sort of see their stock rise when almost anything related to Trump happens.”

GEO Group did not respond to requests for comment.

Chief among criticism by advocates trying to wind down the use of private prisons is that they are not as secure or as safe as publicly run facilities, and that a for-profit industry where companies make more money when more people are arrested and behind bars is inherently problematic.

President Joe Biden had vowed to wind down the federal government’s use of private prisons. And as Tylek noted, Obama had appeared to be on the path toward doing so as well before the Trump administration moved things back in the other direction in 2017.  

But under Biden there has not been a big slowdown, said Eunice Cho, senior staff attorney at the American Civil Liberties Union (ACLU) National Prison Project.

“Despite, I think, the Biden campaign’s promise to shut down private detention centres, and I think President Biden somewhat famously, at least in our circles, said ‘give me five days; I’ll fix this’ in a speech in Georgia, and of course that has never happened,” Cho said.  

Part of the reason it is so difficult to halt the use of private companies is how enmeshed they are in the law enforcement system. It is estimated that the vast majority of people held in Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) detention are in privately run facilities.

Biden did issue an executive order to not renew federal contracts with private prison companies, but the federal government got around directly contracting by going through localities, Cho said.

“So they haven’t really been boxed out of the game,” she said.

Still, under Trump the industry was greeted more favourably and his administration swiftly reversed Obama’s executive order early in his term.

“GEO Group’s profits continued to grow under the Biden administration, but the number of new contracts they were awarded was far less than in the Trump administration,” said White.

When the Trump campaign was asked for comment on GEO Group’s contributions and the former president’s policy on private prisons, Republican National Committee spokesperson Anna Kelly responded by criticising Democratic rival Vice President Kamala Harris’s approach on crime and said Trump was committed to “securing the border” and “standing up for law enforcement.”

Surveillance and monitoring

As the Biden administration faced a record number of encounters along the U.S.-Mexico border, it has deployed technology and monitoring programmes as “alternatives to detention” (ATD) in the immigration system.

But that technology will be a boon for the private prison industry as well, analysts said.

“Electronic monitors didn’t used to be required by the government for everybody who’s not detained, but now they are increasingly,” Tylek said.

Some advocates hope that Harris will have an opportunity to change course, but the technological aspects remain a wild card and they do not necessarily expect a massive shift on private prison and immigration detention issues.

“We are hopeful that the government can find ways to disinvest from private prisons and having such a strong dependency on private prisons,” said Adriel Orozco, senior policy counsel at the non-profit American Immigration Council (AIC).

While immigration is certainly top of mind for voters, it is also unclear how much the public is aware of the extent to which private industry is operating detention facilities.

“Honestly, I think immigration prisons are similar to general prisons. They’re generally out of people’s minds,” Orozco said. “I think people just don’t think about what it means to be someone in these facilities.”

(Reporting by David Sherfinski and Avi Asher-Schapiro; Editing by Jon Hemming.)